The proof of the pudding is in the throwing -- Britain is nutty about sport, even when a ball, bat or racket is nowhere to be seen.
As the nation gears up for a weekend feast of sporting action, notably the start of the Rugby World Cup in Australia and England's crucial Euro 2004 soccer tie with Turkey, a quiet corner of Britain prepares to host the 39th World Conker Championships.
The tournament is one of a number of oddball world sporting events staged in Britain each year.
Last month a pub in northern England hosted the World Black Pudding Throwing Championship while the World Marbles Cup was also staged in a watering hole in the south of the country.
Other annual events are the World Toe Wrestling and World Bog Snorkeling tournaments while all the contests raise money for charity.
"I think it's to do with the [British drinking] culture," -- the reason why so many wacky events are staged here -- explained a spokeswoman for public relations firm Revolver Communications, which helps publicize the contests.
"They all pretty much started around 40 years ago and usually it's out of a couple of blokes having a drink in the pub," spokeswoman Mel Horner said this week.
John Hadman, organizer of the conker championships, said it was "mainly the honor and glory, and exposure to ridicule in the media" that attracts competitors to his tournament.
Around 350 contestants, from as far away as Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada, will descend on the village of Ashton, central England, tomorrow for the one-day conker contest.
Competitors from Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Poland and Ukraine will also take part.
Britain's summer heatwave almost scuppered this year's conker showdown after soaring temperatures resulted in many of the brown nuts falling too early from their horse chestnut trees, leaving them too small and soft to pass competition standards.
"We had to spread our net a bit wider and go further afield [in search of suitable conkers]," explained Hadman.
The game of conkers has been a popular pastime of British schoolchildren for decades. The rules are simple. Each player is given a conker attached to a piece of string and takes turns in trying to break their opponent's nut using a swinging motion.
The world tournament came about after a group of local friends had to cancel their annual fishing trip one year.
"They sat in a bar wondering what to do," said Hadman. "Crying into their beer they looked out and saw conkers falling on the village green. So they went out and had a game."
A new passion was born and the green has since hosted 38 world tournaments.
Since 1965, the championships have also raised close to a ?250,000 (US$415,000) for the blind. "Not bad for seeing people cracking a few nuts," Hadman said.
Sunday's event follows last month's World Black Pudding Throwing Championship, in which competitors from around the globe were tested on their ability to hurl the sausage-like delicacy of cooked pigs' blood, fat and rusk, set in a length of intestine, at a wooden platform 20m high.
Over Easter, Germany's Saxonia Globe Snippers retained the World Marbles Cup, a victory organizers said was down to excessive beer drinking by British competitors.
A cup was awarded to the Snippers while the losers took home two crates of beer. Victors of the World Conker Championships will also take home a trophy and a year's supply of ice cream, courtesy of the event's sponsors.
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